I wish the circumstances around abandonware games weren’t so tenuous, there’s so much great stuff out there and reverse engineering with AI unlocks all sorts of cool possibilities. The multiplayer features here have me thinking about other old games that could be brought online and how fun it could be. SimCity 2000 where all the neighboring cities are real and operated by other players…
Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser (nfsu2.xyz)
402 pointsby fluxusars7 hours ago129 comments
macNchz 2 hours ago
I played this when it was new, taking turns at the keyboard of my friend’s gaming PC. Kind of wild to revisit on my phone today and have it work perfectly.
mvcosta91 2 hours ago
Sim City (2013) with large maps.
Oh boy oh boy. Time to make my boy GLM work on something.
x______________ 2 hours ago
Please keep us updated!
72deluxe an hour ago
I recall playing the demo level on an Elonex laptop that my brother had for work and we played it repeatedly. When SE came out with the 3DFX support, we were absolutely amazed at the fog and water effects in game.
I remember the music being very good, and was sad to learn of the death of the guy who did it at EA a few years back. The menu music was amazing.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
anal_reactor an hour ago
On one hand I'm all for preservation of video games. If the publisher refuses to sell it for a reasonable price, then that's moral permission for piracy. On the other one... the magic isn't there anymore. I'm not a kid. There are very, very few games I can revisit and actually have fun.
mitthrowaway2 34 minutes ago
But when you have a kid, you might want to share the experience with them. They'll see the magic.
NDlurker 18 minutes ago
My brother has our Xbox from when we were kids and his kids love all those games we grew up with.
iugtmkbdfil834 an hour ago
I just saw a game on itch with psx LDS 'reimagining'. Gonna be fun times.
popcar2 2 hours ago
Been playing it the last few days along with a few races with friends, it's pretty wild that this is even possible. The only downside is that this website isn't legal and now that it's popular it's probably getting a takedown soon.
But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work. I use this command to make it work on Chromium:
chromium --enable-unsafe-webgpu --ozone-platform=x11 --use-angle=vulkan --enable-features=Vulkan,VulkanFromANGLE
herodoturtle an hour ago
When you go to enable "Unsafe WebGPU Support" it says the following:
"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."
Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?
Thanks.
iugtmkbdfil834 an hour ago
I was gonna respond with the generic large swath of unverified code running on your machine, but I realized your question is more specific and more interesting. If anyone knows, I would love to hear an answer on this as well.
moron4hire an hour ago
Being new, largely untested code paths in the browser, it's very possible for it to have buffer overflow defects that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on your system. So, basically, literally anything could happen.
William_BB 25 minutes ago
> Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work.
Browsers on macOS do not require you to enable this feature. Does it mean it's on by default?!
hiccuphippo 5 minutes ago
I think the most nefarious thing they can do with this is use it to further fingerprint your browser.
Oops, meant to reply to the GP.
AndriyKunitsyn an hour ago
>But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.
newswasboring 23 minutes ago
Every time this is brought up I always think why can't the company setup a simple website where you pay 1 dollar and get a license?
striking 15 minutes ago
Games are bundles of licenses themselves. That music costs money, as do other assets and sometimes engines. And over time some of those licenses can expire or require renegotiation. Sometimes it's easier to just stop selling something than figure all that out.
staplers 10 minutes ago
Because this is a billion dollar corporation and those typically hire cutthroat teams that negotiate with other cutthroat companies. I recently tried licensing a 50-year-old unaired raw video from a news corporation. It's in the range of $5-10k. We're talking b-roll with dead air and such.. big companies aren't interested in this stuff
rustyhancock 3 hours ago
Huge fan of bringing back older games and updating.
But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
m00dy 3 hours ago
Multiplayer works, great job!
PorciiVorbesc 3 hours ago
>But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
No honor amongst thieves.
I miss the days when pirates did it for the love of the game.
hobofan 3 hours ago
I think the piracy scene has in many aspects always been romaticized to some degree.
With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of the game" and risk criminal charges, while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.
sigmoid10 3 hours ago
The movie ripper scene in particular doesn't need any love for the game, because anyone with the balls to do so can walk into a cinema and set up a telesync. Breaking copyright protection on a game is something that required an enormous skillset that was unachievable for most people before AI. In particular stuff like Denuvo is a constant battle of wits with the DRM people.
brink 2 hours ago
CyberLeek with the GTA6 fiasco is a great example.
They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.
Grombobulous 2 hours ago
It's rightfully romanticized when companies fail to make their products easily available for purchase and usable far into the future.
Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed
Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."
I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.
I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:
If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.
mag7269 2 hours ago
EA: “You software pirates lack honor, you do it just to make a quick buck, just for money! We do it, for glory, for integrity, for respect!”
Us, Pirates: “We each do it for what we lack most.”
Forgeties79 an hour ago
When did that exist? The Napster era when when people just got free music from a central server and accidentally put viruses on their computer half the time? The 18th century on the seas when it was a lot more murder, actual theft, and worse?
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
NooneAtAll5 an hour ago
you're confusing pirate consumers and pirate providers
Forgeties79 32 minutes ago
You’re absolutely right. I was way too eager to jump on that
NooneAtAll5 an hour ago
it's still love of the game tho?
donations are a form of "thank you", completely voluntary
origini 3 hours ago
As a capitalist, I agree.
A company like EA, being known for protecting their critical assets, should not accept that someone is stealing their content from 22 years ago and then even asking for donations.
we should write to EA legal team asap.
/s
"I think it might be quite risky for them to ask for donations, might get them into more trouble"
m00dy 3 hours ago
you can always use monero or (btc and then mixer) or (eth and then tornado cash)
origini 3 hours ago
Yeah but that will not lead to spontanious $5 donation. And i bet, based on the project itself, that the person did not think it through at all. So he would need to buy the server anonomous and the domain too.
m00dy 3 hours ago
yeah you're right, the financial system as a surveillance tool at its finest.
rvz an hour ago
> Huge fan of bringing back older games and updating.
Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live.
Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly.
So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).
blensor an hour ago
Interestingly they kinda already expect that due to their contact details
> Help, bugs and questions: our Discord. > Rights holders: legal (at) nfsu2.xyz.
I wonder if the email just goes to /dev/null
Forgeties79 33 minutes ago
I think they should be far more worried about the music rights holders than EA. When I fired it up I was greeted to a menu playing The Doors & Snoop Dogg lol
donatj 2 hours ago
Something about the like soft almost dream like lighting of this era of games just feels so much more comforting and inviting than todays hyper realistic graphics.
cite_please 2 hours ago
Having game designers rather than film school hacks might have something to do with it.
threetonesun 2 hours ago
I've often felt this most with the Grand Theft Auto games, there was a level of visual abstraction in the III series that IV and V lost and trying to take in the world moving around you is too much.
Jtarii an hour ago
Art is born out of limitations, if you only have a PS2 to work with you have to get creative to make it look good. Now you can just dump whatever you want into the game.
MayeulC 5 hours ago
This is great, I have been thinking about revisiting this old game. Unfortunately, it is not available for sale anywhere (probably for music licensing issues, see other games such as Alan Wake), and older versions don't run as well as they could.
I do find it legally dubious to also host the assets, but at least they make it easy to jump in.
Free roam with online players is such a great concept! However, playing in the browser is not ideal. Are the extra features (name claims, multiplayer free roam, etc) available in a native version? It is unclear to me whether https://github.com/TalhaMudo/NFSU2Recomp includes these extra goodies.
A relatively good resource to discover game recompilations is https://recomp.gg/, but there is no obvious way to contribute, and no search functionalityy.
gonzalohm 4 hours ago
What do you mean about Alan Wake? It's available in online stores
sufficientsoup 4 hours ago
It was temporarily removed some years back
jasomill an hour ago
A better example is Spec Ops: The Line, which was removed from online stores in 2024 and remains unavailable to this day.
MayeulC 2 hours ago
I used it as a notorious example (among others) of a game that was removed from storefronts because of music licensing deals expiring: https://www.reddit.com/r/gog/comments/6asmg9/alan_wake_will_...
Looking a bit more into it, they are now selling the game again, with some track removed (notably "space oddity").
NFSU2 is known for its iconic music, so I am not sure they could sell copies without at least some of the more iconic original music.
DANmode 3 hours ago
> I do find it legally dubious to also host the assets, but at least they make it easy to jump in.
A firm has generational culture locked up, and won’t take money for even a low-effort re-release?
Nobody’s being harmed, here.
leni536 2 hours ago
I was pleasantly surprised recently with the lutris install scripts on Linux for NFSU2. I remember a few years ago struggling with it, it ran but often crashed in the middle of the game.
SylonZero 32 minutes ago
This is such a fun blast from the past! I remember playing the entire NFS Underground on both the PC and the XBox - it had the most fun gameplay even compared to all the newer, shinier stuff that came later. LLAP.
alexpadula 6 minutes ago
That was fun!
AlfeG 21 minutes ago
Very nice loading times. Almost instant from cold start. Some clever tech used.
zacian 4 hours ago
Riders on the storm ...
boltzmann64 an hour ago
into this house we're born …
selectAll an hour ago
The best part for me was Riders on the Storm by The Doors. Without NFS I probably would never have come across the song. I still listen to it now and then and it brings back that same feeling every time.
bwnkl an hour ago
I got this for my 9th birthday when it was just out, but wasn't able to install it on my dad's PC so the only way to play it was at friends' houses.
So nice to see this work in a browser on my ancient smart phone without any issue.
72deluxe an hour ago
I remember trying to play Need For Speed 1 and that was incredibly sensitive to damage and I found it very difficult compared to 2. Need For Speed 3 changed the default camera angle to make the car take up a lot of the screen. But I remember having a lot of fun with the game. It came with a PC my dad bought but there was zero chance it'd run on that DirectX HAL3D "GPU" and the Cyrix processor in it. Ah, the memories.
They also remember Screamer and Screamer 2 being great around the same time.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
havaloc 2 hours ago
Funny how AI has enabled us to long for the days without AI. We didn't know what we had in the 90s/2000s, it was the golden age in PC gaming.
wiseowise 2 hours ago
There was always loyal community around “old” games, this has nothing to do with AI. It’s the modern, shallow, money-first game development approach that pushes people. AI is a godsend that allows to cheaply modify the games.
Xenoamorphous an hour ago
I loved the original NFS games where you could drive exotic cars in open roads, and didn’t love when they started being about modded regular cars… still had a lot of fun with this Underground 2.
tarruda 3 hours ago
I remember playing this on a PC when it came out. Graphics still looks good today and is surprisingly playable on a 8 inch tablet.
tap-snap-or-nap 4 hours ago
It played perfectly for me, very nostalgic. Amazed how it just worked.
harrisoned an hour ago
I played a lot of this with a friend a few days ago, it's awesome. I hope more old games get revived this way, specially the unique ones where we don't have a modern equivalents that are better.
geekgod382 2 hours ago
I am a huge fan of Need For Speed. This game gave me nostalgia. The best 60 minutes I have spent!
gbraad 5 hours ago
I guess this was made with automatic shift in mind? There are no controls for manual shifting on-screen. Did not find an easy way to enable this. Stutters often due to asset loading. Not a very pleasant experience... and likely very illegal to distribute/host (though I 'own' this game).
Allwynd 2 hours ago
It's cool, I saw a lot of people posting videos and screenshots of thousands of players online. I briefly remember playing NFSUG2 but it was never my cup of tea. Somehow the open world felt a bit empty, hopefully this makes it feel more alive.
On the website they seem to be doing NFSUG1 as well and it's my favorite version of NFS and I hope I can check it out when it's ready.
chiengineer3 33 minutes ago
chitown26.com - turned my portfolio into a full arcade with custom games
theropost 4 hours ago
https://voxelblox-notes.pages.dev/play/
This stuff is fun lately, I've been working on an engine for a while and ported a little game over to the browser here. It's a voxel kart racer as a browser project. Think classic kart racing, but with a voxel aesthetic. It's a fun little experiment, so I figured I'd share it here!
hexad74 4 hours ago
This is fun. It reminds me a bit of Lego Racers from 1999.
theropost 4 hours ago
Thanks! Still needs a bit of work and polish, of course, but glad you enjoyed it! It includes multiplayer as well, which I've done a bit of testing on. If you notice anything or have any suggestions, feel free to let me know. I enjoy tinkering with these kinds of projects!
Dries007 5 hours ago
The chaos of all of the other players joining in career mode is really funny.
sheepscreek 36 minutes ago
Playing in freeplay, I feel like I am Jason Dessen from Dark Matter. So many green Nissan 350Zs. It is impossible to drive a 100ft without hitting someone like me.
graso 2 hours ago
It is surprising that it works decently on an old Android phone (A525G)
jon-wood 2 hours ago
This game ran smoothly on a PlayStation 2, which is massively less performant than even the cheapest phones these days.
senfiaj 4 hours ago
For me performance is poor, it's unplayable. To run the game, I had to turn on Chrome's enable-unsafe-webgpu setting.
KMnO4 4 hours ago
For comparison, I get a perfect frame rate on an iPhone 14.
Whatever computer you’re using must be slower than a 4 year old phone.
senfiaj 4 hours ago
Just enabled a couple of flags (#enable-vulkan, #default-angle-vulkan), now it's good.
lbreakjai 2 hours ago
It's odd, it worked flawlessly on a M2 Macbook air running Firefox. I usually have to switch to Chrome for anything fancier than just browsing.
senfiaj 2 hours ago
On Ubuntu WebGPU and Vulkan was disabled, after enabling, it ran well.
catoc 2 hours ago
For me it worked fine - even on an iPhone running Safari